Category: Socialism

At least even moonbats would have to agree that we are better off with Trump than with a socialist tyrant, in light of what has been going on under Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. People have been reduced to eating pets and zoo animals, while Maduro refuses to let aid into the country. They are so desperate, they are resorting to sewers in search of water. A booming economy under Trump is better than that, right?

Wrong, according to “Hands Off Venezuela” protesters who rallied at Lafayette Square near the White House yesterday:

If he’s watching this, Bernie Sanders must be wringing his hands with glee.

Venezuela has actually put into practice the ideology promulgated by agenda-setting Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Let’s see if they think it would be a good idea for the USA to follow suit. Daniel Di Martino had to flee his country. He gives a first-hand report on what socialism did to Venezuela and what it will do to us:

If we could get this video in front of enough voters, America might be saved from the likes of AOC, Bernie Sanders, et al. But don’t expect the mainstream media to show anything like it.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — a driving force in the Democrat Party — is a socialist devoted to eradicating capitalism. Yet she does not understand either capitalism or socialism, mistaking moronic slogans for meaningful definitions. Successful businessman Andy Puzder of Carl’s Jr fame confirms it:

If AOC did understand what capitalism and socialism are, to espouse the views she does would require her to be evil rather than ditsy. For now I’ll save that allegation for the sinister characterspulling her strings.

Under socialism, you eventually run out of everything except equality. This includes water, as those who have not yet escaped Venezuela are learning:

Residents in San Diego, Carabobo state, flooded social media with pictures and videos of the black water while complaining it had been contaminated with oil.

That gives an idea of how much oil Venezuela is floating on, which is why it was the wealthiest country in Latin America prior to socialism. Venezuela has the largest proven reserves of crude oil in the world. Under capitalism, that oil would be converted into money, and the money would build functional infrastructure that would provide citizens with water. Under socialism, the oil is useless, because you can’t drink it or even bathe in it.

The city has suffered with an intermittent water supply for months, made worse by a week-long power blackout that has completely cut it off in some areas, local journalists said. …

People have been forced to scavenge for water from sewers, drains and rivers. …

The blackout has worsened the situation of a country already facing a hyperinflationary economic collapse that has spurred a mass migration and turned once-basic items like corn flour and toilet paper into unaffordable luxuries.

Sympathy is tempered by the fact that Venezuelans voted for this. True, their elections have degenerated into charades, but this ball was started rolling when the Venezuelan version of Bernie Sanders was legitimately elected by the same sort of spiteful, envious fools who infest our own country in alarmingly large numbers.

Blue Collar Logic introduces the worst band ever: Bernie & the Leftists. They only know one song, because they only have one goal — maximize government power by imposing a system similar to that of the USSR.

The reason their ideology failed in Russia is that it is tommyrot. In addition to being dysfunctional, it is morally wrong.

Bernie has a point when he praises breadlines. In socialist Venezuela, a breadline would be a good thing, as it would imply that there might be some bread.

Oakland teachers are on strike. Given the staggering greed that characterizes teachers strikes, as well as the ideology teachers often inculcate in the classroom, no one should be surprised to learn that Marxists have been instigating and organizing behind the scenes.

The Oakland Education Association has launched a Bread for Ed program to raise funds to buy food for teachers and kids who are normally fed by the government through schools. The initiative is supported by East Bay DSA.

Bread for Ed has other supporters, but none plays such a crucial role. Look what we find at the bottom of the Donor Box page:

A note to all supporters: Per OEA’s request, funds will be collected by East Bay DSA and paid out to our local food provider partners, and remaining funds will be sent to the OEA member assistance fund (strike fund). East Bay DSA is a 501c4 so your donations are not tax-deductible.

They have already raised over $132,000 toward a goal of $150,000 on the Donor Box page. That buys a lot of sandwiches. Who knows what else it might buy for the communists collecting the money?

Other supporting organizations include the International Socialist Organization, Northern California. Click through and you will see plenty of fists belligerently raised in the air, symbolizing the triumph of communism over liberty. The organization is openly Marxist, specifically with a Leninist orientation. Lenin is the communist dictator who invented the concentration camp, which was later copied by the Nazis. Not the kind of people most of us would want involved in education.

Speaking of people most of us would not want involved in education, check out this page from the official magazine of the California Teachers Association, which praises the Black Panthers:

Bread for Ed ties directly into the radical, racial justice work started by the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s. The free breakfast the Panthers gave to children in Oakland spurred the government and school districts to beef up their in-school food programs.

The Black Panther Party was a race-based revolutionary organization that did not stop short of murder. Other activities included drug dealing, pimping, rape, extortion, and assault. Oh, and feeding the children.

Gallup confirms that Democrats prefer socialism to economic freedom. Prominent Democrats are even moving beyond quasi-capitalist half-socialism to something that looks a lot like the full-bore communism inflicted by the Khmer Rouge. Socialism is particularly popular on college campuses, due to saturation brainwashing by the progressives in charge. It is less popular among people who have experienced socialism first hand, like Venezuelans at the recent Venezuelan Freedom rally in DC:

If Bernie Sanders is America’s Hugo Chavez, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is our Pol Pot. Her demented Green New Deal would require totalitarian social engineering on a scale not seen since the Khmer Rouge killed off a quarter of the population of Cambodia. The more we learn about it, the more loudly sane people laugh — unless they have read up on their 20th century history and realize that people like her sometimes end up in power.

Stalin only had 5-year plans. AOC doubles that with a 10-year plan that eliminates all greenhouse gas emissions. This alone is impossible; merely breathing creates greenhouse gas emissions. But this isn’t really about global warming malarkey. It is about leaving “liberalism” behind and going whole hog for communism.

Per OAC’s website (although it looks like they just now took this down), the Green New Deal explicitly guarantees everyone the following at everyone else’s expense:

• A job with family-sustaining wages, family and medical leave, vacations, and retirement security
• High-quality education, including higher education and trade schools
• High-quality health care
• Clean air and water
• Healthy food
• Safe, affordable, adequate housing
• An economic environment free of monopolies [except for Big Government, which would have an absolute monopoly on everything]
• Economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work

You read that correctly: unwilling to work. Here we see why the dregs of humanity will actually vote for socialists like Bernie and AOC. The plan is for us to work as slaves to finance their workfree lifestyle as they lay around puffing on legalized dope. Because “social justice.”

AOC’s wish list would come at an incomprehensible cost, which she resolutely refuses to address. Even at a 100% taxation rate, there is no chance we could afford any of it after the economy has been reduced to absolute ruin by a ban on the fossil fuels and nuclear energy that make it go. Presumably, the plan is to just print the money, like they do in other socialist utopias like Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

Even a half-serious attempt to bring this to fruition would mean the collapse of the economy, totalitarianism, and the effective end of property rights. In short, this is a call for the end civilization in America.

That’s okay, people chuckle. Everyone knows that AOC is a screwball and far dumber than most of her fellow bartenders. No one takes this stuff seriously.

The plan, which calls for a massive package of big-government proposals including health care for all, quickly picked up the backing of major 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls including Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Cory Booker, D-N.J. — who all co-sponsored the resolution.

Even a token attempt to implement this agenda would be devastating to the economy. The government is already about $22 trillion in debt and counting quickly. Merely to elect someone who would not react to the Green New Deal with horror would be to move the Overton window so far to the left as to exclude wealth and freedom from our socialist future.

Democrats are not the only ones who insist on proving yet again that socialism does not work. Panera Bread recently proved it by applying Marx’s “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” motto to selling food:

Panera Bread’s socialist pay-what-you-want restaurant, Panera Cares, will officially be closing shop on February 15 due to the business model’s unsustainability.

Moonbats like sustainability when it comes to envirotyrannical demagoguery, but not so much regarding economic matters.

Panera tried to create a socialist system in which meals were offered at a suggested donation price. That means some people would pay more while others would pay less based on what they felt like or could afford. By not simply offering food at a low price (hat-tip, Dollar Tree), Panera completely removed any incentive for patrons to meet even the lowest standards of consumer/retailer exchange. The result: some people paid their fair share while others enjoyed a “free lunch.”

If that sounds familiar, you may be thinking of the Welfare State.

Panera Cares went on to open five locations in cities like Dearborn, Portland, Chicago, Boston, and St. Louis. None of the restaurants were self-sustaining, with some locations reportedly being “mobbed” by students along with homeless people looking for a free meal.

This calls to mind the underdefended US border.

The last remaining Panera Cares will be shut down next week in Boston. Too bad the border won’t be shut down so long as socialists have a say in the matter.

• Medicare for All. Bernie Sanders’ plan, which has been endorsed by 16 other Senators, would replace all private health insurance in the U.S. with a federally administered single-payer health-care program. Government would decide what care to deliver, which drugs to pay for, and how much to pay doctors and hospitals. Private insurance would be banned.

That is, medical care in the USA would be provided on the same basis as in the USSR — and before long, at the same level of quality.

• The Green New Deal. This idea, endorsed by 40 House Democrats and several Democratic presidential candidates, would require that the U.S. be carbon neutral within 10 years. Non-carbon sources provide only 11% of U.S. energy today, so this would mean a complete remake of American electric power, transportation and manufacturing.

This a Khmer Rouge level of coercive social transformation. It would require a Khmer Rouge level tyranny to impose. The effect on our standard of living would be similar to what Pol Pot inflicted. If they actually try to impose this — and some Democrats clearly want to — the collapse of the economy will lead to mass starvation .

• A guaranteed government job for all. To assist in this 10-year transformation of society, the Green New Deal’s authors would “provide all members of our society, across all regions and all communities, the opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the transition, including through a job guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one.”

In the Soviet Union, they supposedly had full employment — and would assign two government slaves to watch a single cow graze. The cost of full employment guaranteed by government is unimaginable in terms of lost efficiency.

• A new system for corporate control. Senator Elizabeth Warren wants a new federal charter for businesses with more than $1 billion in annual revenue that would make companies answer to more than shareholders. Employees would elect 40% of directors, who would be obliged to consider “benefits” beyond returns to the owners. This radical redesign of corporate governance would give politicians and their interest groups new influence over private business decisions and assets.

Blessedly, Warren’s absurd claim to be a politically sacred Indian no longer advances her career but rather is taking a toll on it. But she is hardly the only economic authoritarian in the Democrat Party.

• Vastly higher taxes. These ideas would require much more government revenue, and Democrats are eagerly proposing ways to raise it.

The higher taxes climb, the wealthier and more powerful the government is — and the poorer and more helpless we are.

We spent a vast fortune on a nuclear arsenal and committed ourselves to mutual assured destruction rather than submit to subsistence as enslaved mediocrities under socialism because we insisted on living as Americans who have the opportunity to excel. Marxists reacted by infiltrating and subverting key institutions like the media and the universities, in accordance with the strategy outlined by Antonio Gramsci and Rudi Dutschke. Their Long March Through the Institutions has put them in a position to brainwash and erode the character of whole generations. If they succeed in reducing us to less than American, socialism will prevail.

If bureaucrats pushing wealth redistribution schemes like basic income expect gratitude from the beneficiaries of their coercive largesse, they are fools. You won’t find gratitude where you have entitlement.

Members of an internationally lauded basic income pilot project in Canada are taking their province to court over its surprise cancellation, arguing that the Ontario government’s decision is unethical and that it was made in bad faith.

What, you were expecting them to say, “Thanks for all the free money, I knew this was too unfair to last forever”?

Once you start giving people other people’s money, it is “unethical” to stop. The free money becomes the right of those receiving it. This is why the welfare state is morally depraved and has contributed so conspicuously to undermining the work ethic and to advancing moral decay.

On Jan. 27, a three-judge legal panel heard arguments in a Toronto courthouse. They ultimately reserved judgment, meaning they haven’t yet decided whether to uphold the government’s decision or accept the recipients’ request to quash the cancellation.

Legislation isn’t needed anymore. Leftist law schools have produced whole generations of judges likely to bang their gavel and proclaim that your money belongs to someone else, not even because they need it, but just because they would rather not have to work for it like you did.

Looks like Margaret Thatcher was right; sooner or later, socialists run out of other people’s money. In New York’s case, they are running out of people to loot who still create wealth rather than vote for a living.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Monday announced a dramatic drop in state income tax revenue of $2.8 billion, which he says will prompt him to revise his 2019-20 budget and reconsider spending on schools, health care and repairs to roads and bridges.

It’s all the fault of Trump and his dastardly tax relief package.

Cuomo said the law’s cap on deductions for state and local taxes at $10,000 was to blame and suggested it is, anecdotally, triggering high-earners to leave New York.

If this were a sitcom, the laugh track would kick in here and run for the rest of the story. High earners are leaving New York, all right — because greedy moonbats like Andrew Cuomo are driving them out. Cuomo has explicitly stated that nonleftists are not welcome in New York.

“At this point there is no doubt that the budget we put forward is not supported by the revenues,” Cuomo said at a State Capitol news conference. “It’s as serious as a heart attack.”

Actually, it’s much funnier than a heart attack — at least for those of us who have managed to escape from New York.

When it stops being funny is when radicalized Democrats like New York’s AOC manage to take Venezuela on the Hudson nationwide.

Cuomo said that he and his administration are blameless. He said the continued exodus of residents from the state and a temporary millionaire’s tax created in 2009 to contend with the Great Recession (but which he’s extended since then) are not contributing factors.

You might hope that Cuomo would accept responsibility, learn from his mistakes, and mend his Big Government tax & spend ways. But no; he proposes extending the “temporary” millionaire’s tax for another 5 years, while using accounting gimmicks to pretend he is keeping spending increases under a 2% cap.

What’s next, now that Kamala Harris has confirmed the fundamental right to demand free healthcare? Why not a right to free housing? Congressional Islamocommie Ilhan Omar (D-MN) — ally of the odious Rashida Tlaib — is on it:

“In the richest country in the world there’s no reason we can’t guarantee the right to affordable quality housing to everyone in the U.S.,” Omar said.

“And in 116th Congress, this should be a top priority,” she continued.

With socialists like Ilhan in charge, this won’t stay the richest country in the world for long. Prior to Chavez/Maduro, Venezuela was the richest country in Latin America.

“Our homelessness crisis is not a crisis of scarcity, but a crisis of moral clarity,” she said.

Omar gripes that we spend too much on the military when we should be spending the money buying people “affordable” (i.e., heavily subsidized right up to being free) housing. I wonder why an Islamic supremacist representing a Somali colony (New Mogadishu, formerly known as Minneapolis) would want us to neglect military spending.

The really scary part comes when Dems proclaim that food is a human right. Consider the cornucopia of offerings at the nearest supermarket. Then consider what the shelves will look like when the federal government has taken control. We will find ourselves shopping in Venezuela.

Milton Friedman warned us that if you put Big Government in charge of the Sahara, there would eventually be a shortage of sand. But who could believe that a country run on Marxist principles could ever run out of crap? Yet Kim Jong Un has demanded that North Koreans provide the government with over 220 pounds per day of human manure to use as fertilizer to revive the agricultural sector, according to Fox News:

If the people don’t meet their daily quota, they have to supply over 600 pounds of compost or livestock manure, according to Radio Free Asia.

That could be even harder to accomplish, when your only livestock was a cat that you butchered years ago to keep the kids from starving.

But socialism will work better in the USA. Just ask Bernie or Kamala.

“The entire population has been mobilized to produce manure as the first major task of the year,” a source told the outlet. …

“They are demanding that each person produce 100kg of human feces per day, or about 3 tons per month,” the person added. “But how on earth can it be possible for one person to make 3 tons of human feces and deliver it?”

New York’s communist mayor Bill de Blasio has offered world class healthcare to anyone who shows up, from anywhere in the world, regardless of their ability to pay and regardless of whether they are in the country legally. This obviously entails a stratospheric cost. How will he pay for it? The same way communists pay for everything — by seizing other people’s property. De Blasio embraces theft, not only to raise funds, but to advance socialism more directly by confiscating property from landlords:

“When a landlord tries to push out a tenant by making their home unlivable, a team of inspectors and law enforcement agents will be on the ground in time to stop it,” the mayor said. If fines and penalties don’t do the trick, then “we will seize their buildings, and we will put them in the hands of a community nonprofit that will treat tenants with the respect they deserve,” he added.

To find allegedly misbehaving landlords to demonize and loot, de Blasio has created an ominous new agency called the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.

NYC already has an Office of the Tenant Advocate. But there could never be enough government agencies to suit an authoritarian moonbat.

According to the executive order that created it, the new agency…

…will serve as a “central resource for tenants, social service agencies, advocacy organizations, legal services providers, landlords and management companies of affordable housing, and others on tenant issues,” including “tenant harassment.”

De Blasio’s base regards housing as a human right, just like healthcare. “Tenant harassment” will come to mean asking tenants to pay their rent.

Making it increasingly unprofitable if not impossible to be a landlord in NYC will not improve the supply of housing. This is not a bug but a feature. The higher Big Government drives rent, the easier it is to demonize landlords and justify authoritarian measures.

By the way, who is the worst landlord in all of New York?

In December, then-NYC Public Advocate Letitia James, who’s since been sworn in as attorney general of New York State, put the city’s own housing authority at the top of her “2018 NYC Landlord Watchlist.”

If NYC’s political trajectory continues on its current descent, there will soon be only one landlord in the rotting Big Apple: the New York City Housing Authority.

The Green New Deal championed by radical Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would cost many trillions of dollars. She proposes to pay for it by looting the rich. One problem with raising taxes on the rich is that the rich are already paying an outrageously unjust “fair share” of taxes.

– The top one percent of households pay 39.4 percent of federal income taxes and 26.2 percent of total federal taxes.

– The top 20 percent of households pay 88.1 percent of federal income taxes and 69.5 percent of total federal taxes.

The rich will soon be tapped out — unless by “the rich,” Democrats mean anyone who isn’t poor.

The middle class is where the money is. That’s where they will do ever more of their looting as they continue to grow Big Government.

As Democrats scheme to impose fully socialized medicine (a.k.a. Medicare for All) on the USA, here is how it is working out in Canada:

Her daughter was born with a heart condition and was having chest pains, but [Shellann] Wallace said they waited almost seven hours before seeing a doctor.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I thought we were in a third-world country.”

The transformation of First World to Third World is what progressives are all about.

If your medical condition is urgent, the last place you want to go is an emergency room in a country where Big Government has taken over medicine:

Across [Ontario] people spend an average of 16 hours in the emergency room before getting admitted. That’s more than two hours longer than three years ago.

Socialized medicine starts off on the wrong foot and stumbles steadily downhill as bureaucrats fall back on cuts and rationing to keep ever-climbing costs under control.

Meanwhile, Democrats want to spend $32.6 trillion over 10 years to replace our healthcare system with a similar mess. If any liberal complains about the admittedly alarming growth of the national debt, ask them how they feel about Medicare for All. If they are in favor, you are entitled to burst into guffaws.

The Russians and Chinese have been busily working on superweapons that can be deployed against the USA. They needn’t bother. Nothing they are likely to come up with will do as much damage as Medicare for All, which will be inflicted as soon as Democrats have the political leverage:

Bloomberg sums up the situation ham-fisted socialism has created in Venezuela, which was until recently the wealthiest country in Latin America:

It’s hard to overstate how disastrous the reign of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro has been for Venezuela. A recent series of Bloomberg articles vividly depicts the hellish, never-ending struggle for survival in Caracas, the country’s capital. Hungry children roam the streets, people are fleeing the country, health care is almost nonexistent, violence is endemic, even water is scarce. Chavez’s so-called Bolivarian revolution took a peaceful, middle-income country and transformed it into a nightmare that puts the ruinous Soviet Union of the 1980s to shame.

It’s important for other countries — including wealthy ones like the U.S. — not to ignore Venezuela, but to use it as a cautionary tale. Politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have embraced socialism, as have many young Americans.

The nightmare unfolding in Venezuela will not dissuade the oligarchical collectivist authoritarians who dominate the Democrat Party. They plan to put the socialist pedal to the metal:

The party agenda is increasingly embracing big-government policies like “Medicare-for-all” and guaranteed jobs programs — as well as an aggressive “Green New Deal” that would include all this and more as part of a fundamental overhaul to America’s economy and specifically its energy sector.

Obama declared war on this vital sector of the economy, boasting that he would cause energy prices to skyrocket and that anyone who tried to build a new coal plant would be bankrupted. His Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar gloated about the administration having its “boot on the neck” of BP. The moment they have the political leverage, Democrats will resume this senseless, damaging war — and escalate it.

As far back as last summer, Democrats viewed socialism more positively than economic freedom. At the rate they are radicalizing, by 2020 they will probably view Stalin more favorably than FDR.

Socialists as malevolently wacky as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have taken over not only Venezuela, but major countries. In Russia and China, the results were poverty, misery, slavery, and genocide on a massive scale.

Never mind the alarming Green New Deal. Even the relatively modest Medicare for All would cost tens of $trillions over a decade. With the USA already shouldering a $22 trillion national debt, economic collapse is hardly inconceivable. When it comes, anything is possible — as the horrors of the USSR and Mao’s China proved.

“Together, Ocasio-Cortez’s proposals would effectively eliminate fossil fuels from most of society, destroy millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of wealth, require ‘upgrading’ every home and business in America, create a national federal jobs-guarantee program, impose single-payer health care (costing trillions more), establish a new system of publicly owned banks, run up the national debt by countless trillions of dollars, and move the United States closer than ever to socialism,” Justin Haskins, a research fellow at the Heartland Institute, wrote in an op-ed for Fox News. “If we don’t stop it, it will destroy our economy for a whole generation of Americans.”

What is happening in Venezuela — or worse — can and will happen here if radicalized Democrats have their way.